Social Relations and War Remembrance: Second World War Atrocities in Rural Tuscan Villages

This article addresses the issue of how long-term memory of extreme conditions is socially transformed. It focuses on elements of the social structure and pre-war habitus that might help understanding of the divided memory of massacres that were perpetrated by the Nazis in three rural Tuscan villages between 1943 and 1944. Within the "mnemonic communities", discrepancies arise since some of the villagers paradoxically blame the partisans instead of the Nazis. An attempt is made to trace current representations of historical events in the framework of traditional social institutions and political life of these small villages in time of crisis. Battles over memory are seen as a twofold process-that is, as part of "internal", intra-village relations as well as a form of reaction toward the "external" world of which they feel victims. The article argues that long-term memory of past political violence is strictly bound up with local power relations.